George Barker: ‘The triumph of the incommunicable’

George Barker has always been a troubling poet. Lionized in the 1930s and 1940s along with fellow Apocalyptic Poets Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, by the time of Margaret Drabble’s overview of his life’s work in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, Barker is summarily dismissed as ‘characteristically rhetorical, Dionysian, and surreal, though some critics have suggested that he achieves disorder more by accident than intent’. My purpose in the next few pages is to directly challenge these assertions of bombast, overexuberance and superficiality. Both W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot regarded him as a ‘genius’. Harold Pinter praised him as ‘a love poet of the highest order’. Yet Barker is forgotten now. I want to suggest that this is actually because of the troubling depth of what he has to say, and the clarity with which he says it, rather than the reverse.